Snarls and grunts of effort led me to them. Nighteyes had been brought to bay, his left forepaw curled up to his chest. Blood slicked his left shoulder, and beaded like red jewels on the guard hairs all along his left side. He had backed deeply into a dense thicket of tangled blackberry canes. The savage thorns and snagging runners that he had sought as shelter now fenced him round and blocked his escape. He had pressed into them as deeply as he could to avoid the slashes of the sword, and I could feel the damage to his feet. The thorns that jabbed into Nighteyes likewise kept his attacker at a distance, and the yielding canes absorbed many of the sword’s blows as the man strove to hack through them and get at the wolf.
At the sight of me Nighteyes gathered his courage and rounded suddenly to face his attacker with a savage outburst of snarls. The Forged one drew back his sword for a thrust that would impale my wolf. There was no point on the end of my staff, but with a wordless cry of fury I drove it into the man’s back so brutally that it punched through flesh and into his lungs. He roared out a spattering of red drops and rage. He tried to turn to confront me, but I still had hold of my staff. I threw my weight against it, forcing him staggering into the blackberry tangle. His outstretched hands found nothing to catch him save tearing brambles. I pinned him into the yielding blackberry canes with my full weight on the staff and Nighteyes, emboldened, sprang onto his back. The wolf’s jaws closed on the back of the man’s thick neck and worried at him until blood spattered both of us. The Forged one’s strangling cries gradually diminished to passive gurglings.
I had completely forgotten about the minstrels until a deep cry of anguish recalled them to me. Stooping, I seized the sword the Forged one had dropped and ran back to the road, leaving Nighteyes to flop down exhausted and begin licking at his shoulder. As I burst out of the woods, a horrifying sight met my eyes. The Forged one had flung himself upon a struggling Honey and was tearing at her clothes. Piper knelt in the road dust, clutching at her arm and shrieking wordlessly. A disheveled and dusty Josh had climbed to his feet and, staffless, was groping toward Piper’s cries.
In a moment I was in their midst. I kicked the man to lift him off Honey, then plunged the sword into him in a downward two-handed thrust. He struggled wildly, kicking and clutching at me, but I leaned on the blade, forcing it down into his chest As he fought against the metal that pinned him, he tore the wound wider. His mouth cursed me with wordless cries and then panting gasps that flung droplets of blood with the sounds. His hands seized my right calf and tried to jerk my leg from under me. I simply put more weight on the blade. I longed to pull the sword out and kill him quickly, but he was so strong I did not dare release him. Honey ended him finally, bringing the end of her staff down in a smashing drive to the center of his face. The man’s sudden stillness was as much a mercy to me as to him. I found the strength to pull the sword out of him, then staggered backward to sit down suddenly in the road.
My vision dimmed and cleared and dimmed again. Piper’s screams of pain might have been the distant crying of seabirds. Suddenly there was too much of everything and I was everywhere. Up in the woods, I licked at my shoulder, a laying aside of dense fur with my tongue, a careful probing of the slash as I coated it with saliva. And yet I sat in the sun on the road, smelling dust and blood and excrement as the slain man’s bowels loosened. I felt every blow I had taken and dealt, the exertion as well as the jolting damage from the club’s impact. The savage way I had killed suddenly had a different connotation to me. I knew what it was to feel the kind of pain that I had inflicted. I knew what they had felt, down and struggling without hope, with death as their only escape from more pain. My mind vibrated between the extremes of killer and victim. I was both.
And alone. More alone than I had ever been. Always before, at a time like this, there had been someone for me. Shipmates at the end of a battle, or Burrich coming to patch me up and drag me home, and a home waiting for me, with Patience to come and fuss over me, or Chade and Verity to remonstrate with me to be more careful of myself. Molly arriving with the quiet and the darkness to touch me softly. This time the battle was over, and I was alive, but no one save the wolf cared. I loved him, but suddenly I knew that I longed for a human touch as well. The separation from those who had cared about me was more than I could bear. Had I been truly a wolf, I would have lifted my nose to the sky and howled. As it was, I reached out, in a way I cannot describe. Not the Wit, not the Skill, but some unholy blending of the two, a terrible questing for someone, anywhere, who might care to know I was alive.
Almost, I felt something. Did Burrich, perhaps, somewhere lift up his head and look about the field he worked in, did he for an instant smell blood and dust instead of the rich earth he turned up to harvest the root crops? Did Molly straighten up from her laundering and set her hands to her aching back and look about, wondering at a sudden pang of desolation? Did I tug at Verity’s weary consciousness, distract Patience for a moment or two from sorting her herbs on the drying trays, set Chade to frowning as he set a scroll aside? Like a moth battering against a window, I rattled myself against their consciousnesses. I longed to feel the affection I had taken for granted. Almost, I thought, I reached them, only to fall back exhausted into myself, sitting alone in the dust of the road, with the blood of three men spattered on me.
She kicked dirt on me.
I lifted my eyes. At first Honey was a dark silhouette against the westering sun. Then I blinked and saw the look of disgust and fury on her face. Her clothes were torn, her hair draggled about her face. “You ran away!” she accused me. I felt how much she despised my cowardice. “You ran away, and left him to break Piper’s arm and club my father down and try to rape me. What kind of a man are you? What kind of a man can do a thing like that?”
There were a thousand answers to that, and none. The emptiness inside me assured me that nothing would be solved by speaking to her. Instead I pushed myself to my feet. She stared after me as I walked back down the road to where I had dropped my pack. It seemed like hours since I had kicked it clear of my feet. I picked it up and carried it back to where Josh sat in the dust beside Piper and tried to comfort her. Pragmatic Honey had opened their packs. Josh’s harp was a tangle of wood bits and string. Piper would play no pipes until her arm healed weeks from now. It was as it was, and I did what I could do about it.
And that was nothing, save build a fire by the side of the road, and fetch water from the river and set it to boiling. I sorted out the herbs that would calm Piper and soften the pain of her arm. I found dry straight sticks and shaved them flat for splinting. And up on the hillside in the woods behind me?
It hurts, my brother, but it did not go deep. Still, it pulls open when I try to walk. And thorns, I am thick with thorns like flies on carrion.
I shall come to you now and pick out every one.
No. I can take care of this myself. See to those others.
He paused.
My brother. We should have run away.
I know.
Why was it so hard to go to Honey and ask quietly if she had cloth we could tear to bind the splinting to Piper’s arm? She did not deign to reply to me, but blind Josh mutely handed me the soft fabric that had once wrapped his harp. Honey despised me, Josh seemed numbed with shock, and Piper was so lost in her own pain she scarcely noticed me. But somehow I got them to move over beside the fire. I walked Piper over there, my arm around her and my free hand supporting her injured arm. I got her seated, and then gave her first the tea I had brewed. I spoke more to Harper Josh than to her when I said, “I can draw the bone straight, and splint it. I’ve had to do as much before for men hurt in battle. But I do not claim to be a healer. When we get to the next town, it may have to be set again.”
He nodded slowly. We both knew there was no real alternative. So he knelt behind Piper and held her by the shoulders, and Honey gripped her upper arm firmly. I set my teeth against the pain she felt and firmly drew her forearm straight. She screamed, of course, for no mere tea could deaden that sort of pain completely. But she also forced herself not to struggle. Tears coursed down her cheeks and her breath came raggedly as I splinted and bound her arm. I showed her how to carry it partially inside her vest to support the weight and steady it against movement. Then I gave her another mug of the tea and turned to Josh.
He had taken a blow to the head, and it had dazed him for a moment, but not knocked him out. There was swelling, and he winced at my touch, but the flesh had not split. I washed it with cool water, and told him the tea might ease him as well. He thanked me, and somehow I felt shamed by it. Then I looked up to where Honey watched me with cat’s eyes across the small fire.
“Were you hurt?” I asked her quietly.
“There’s a knot on my shin the size of a plum where he hit me. And he left claw marks down my neck and breasts trying to get at me. But I can care for my hurts myself, thank you all the same . . . Cob. Small thanks to you I am alive at all.”
“Honey.” Josh spoke in a dangerously low voice. There was as much weariness in it as anger.
“He ran away, Father. He felled his man and then he turned and ran. If he had helped us then, none of this would have happened. Not Piper’s broken arm, nor your smashed harp. He ran away.”
“But he came back. Let us not imagine what would have happened if he had not. Perhaps we took some injuries, but you can still thank him that you are alive.”
“I thank him for nothing,” she said bitterly. “One moment of courage, and he could have saved our livelihood. What have we now? A harper with no harp, and a piper who cannot lift her arm to hold her instrument.”
I rose and walked away from them. I was suddenly too weary to hear her out, and much too discouraged to explain myself at all. Instead I dragged the two bodies from the road, and pulled them onto the sward on the riverside. In the failing light, I reentered the woods, and sought out Nighteyes. He had already cared for his own injuries better than I could. I dragged my fingers through his coat, dusting thorns and bits of blackberry tangle from it. For a short time I sat next to him. He lay down and put his head on my knee and I scratched his ears. It was all the communication we needed. Then I got up, found the third body, gripped it by the shoulders, and dragged it down out of the woods to join the other two. Without compunction, I went through their pockets and pouches. Two of them yielded but a handful of small coins, but the one with the sword had had twelve silver bits in his pouch. I took his pouch and added the other coins to it. I also took his battered sword belt and sheath, and picked up the sword from the road. Then I busied myself until the darkness was complete in picking up river stones and piling them around and finally on top of the bodies. When I had finished, I went down to the river’s edge and laved my hands and arms and splashed water up onto my face. I took off my shirt and rinsed the blood from it, then put it back on cold and wet. For a moment it felt good on my bruises; then my muscles began to stiffen with the chill of it.
I went back to the small fire that now lit the faces of the folk around it. When I got there, I reached for Josh’s hand, and then set the pouch into it. “Perhaps it will be enough to help you along until you can replace your harp,” I told him.
“Dead men’s money to ease your conscience?” Honey sneered.
The frayed ends of my temper parted. “Pretend they survived, for by Buck law they would have had to pay you restitution at least,” I suggested. “And if that still does not please you, throw the coins in the river for all I care.” I ignored her much more thoroughly than she had me. Despite my aches and twinges, I unbundled the sword belt. Nighteyes had been right; the swordsman had been a lot bigger than me. I set the leather against a piece of wood and bored a new hole into the strap with my knife. That done, I stood, and fastened it about me. There was comfort in the weight of a sword at my side again. I drew the blade and examined it by the firelight. It was not exceptional, but it was functional and sturdy.
“Where did you get that?” Piper asked. Her voice was a bit wavery.
“Took it off the third man, up in the woods,” I said shortly. I resheathed it.
“What is it?” Harper Josh asked.
“A sword,” Piper said.
Josh turned his hazy eyes to me. “There was a third man up in the woods with a sword?”
“Yes.”
“And you took it away from him and killed him?”
“Yes.”
He snorted softly and shook his head at himself. “When we shook hands, I knew well it was no scriber’s hand I gripped. A pen does not leave calluses such as you bear, nor does it muscle a forearm that way. You see, Honey, he did not run away. He but went to . . .”
“If he had killed the man attacking us first, it would have been wiser,” she insisted stubbornly.
I undid my bundle and shook out my blanket. I lay down on it. I was hungry, but there was nothing to be done about that. I could do something about how tired I was.
“Are you going to sleep?” Piper asked. Her face reflected as much alarm as she could muster in her drugged state.
“Yes.”
“What if more Forged ones come?” she demanded.
“Then Honey can kill them in whatever order she deems wise,” I suggested sourly. I shifted on my blanket until my sword was clear and handy, and closed my eyes. I heard Honey rise slowly and begin to put out bedding for the rest of them.
“Cob?” Josh asked softly. “Did you take any coin for yourself?”
“I do not expect to have need of coin again,” I told him as quietly. I did not explain that I no longer planned to have much to do with humans. I never wanted to explain myself again to anyone. I did not care if they understood me or not.
I closed my eyes and groped out, to touch briefly with Nighteyes. Like me, he was hungry but had chosen to rest instead.
By tomorrow evening, I shall be free to hunt with you again,
I promised him. He sighed in satisfaction. He was not that far away. My fire was a spark through the trees below him. He rested his muzzle on his forepaws.